February 18, 2007

I'm blogging from LaGuardia airport, waiting for the day's one nonstop flight from NYC to Madison. This morning, I tossed my bags in a cab and made it uptown to the Metropolitan Museum where I took a hundred photographs and then got in line at the restaurant to order up my one meal of the day.

I got to jump the line by agreeing to take a seat at the counter. I was going to write some notes for my Tuesday column, but the woman on the next stool struck up a conversation. It turns out she's an artist, Lynn Pulsifer. Check out her awesome pastels:

She leaves. I do my notes. I drink a lot of black coffee, then collect my things to go. Working my way to the exit, I go in an exhibit the back way. Wow! What is this? I'm blown away! It's "Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s." No photos from me. You can't do photography at a current exhibition, which is an acceptable rule. It would have been annoying. The show was really crowded. (Tomorrow's the last day.)

Here are some images on the Met's website. I especially loved Otto Dix:

The intense caricatures sealed themselves onto my retinas so that when I started looking around at the people in the gallery, they seemed all to have the look of the decadent Germans in the pictures.

High on art, manic, I traipse through the museum store and find myself spending $300 on two scarves. The chartreuse one with photo-realistic, pop art flowers called out to me. Then another, pale gold and dripping with glass beads, cried that it needed me too.

Now, I'm at the airport. There's WiFi. I'm not manic anymore, but I feel great. Soon I'll be on the plane. Deprived of access, I'm going to type out two or three column ideas I have and see which one tells me it wants to be the Tuesday.

ARGGHHH: It's quarter to 10 and I'm still at the airport. Yes, the flight is non-stop, but so far it's also been non-start. I'm just glad there's been WiFi, electrical outlets, and consistent reason to believe that we will make it home tonight.

MORE: We were waiting for a plane and a crew that needed to go through the Cleveland airport, where this happened:

A commuter plane carrying more than 70 people ran off the end of a snowy runway and pierced a fence after landing at the Cleveland airport Sunday, officials said. No injuries were reported.

The plane came to a stop more than 150 feet past the end of the runway, said Thonnia Lee, a spokeswoman for Delta Air Lines Inc. The engines were partially buried in snow and the tip of the plane's nose was resting on a roadway the airport uses to get to perimeter buildings...

The airport was closed for about an hour and a half and some planes were diverted to other cities....

9 comments:

I dug some of Pulsifer's Italian ones, though not so much the poplar-poplar-poplar series. But you could chuck those in with the art-and-sexuality stuff. Unfortunately they all seemed to me more like illustration than so-called "fine" "art", somehow, and the poplars most of all. Something about the poplars said "article about financial planning" to me.

Any chance of talking a certain senator from Arizona into hiring Pulsifer's web designer?

Sorry you're stuck in the airport. At least they didn't insist y'all sit on the plane! When we flew back from England in January, the connecting flight from Newark to Indianapolis loaded us on board and then sat on the runway for nearly two hours while they fiddled with a radio replacement.

You might have considered my advice toward the end of this thread, and gone hang gliding back to Madison. Here's a little video, not for the acrophobic. Given the objections reality check raised here about your mode of travel, it would seem the only option.

This is coming only from an appreciator, not an expert, but I think the most powerful and brilliant paintings of the 20th century were those of the German expressionists. I would rank that group above any other school of the past century. How lucky you got to see this exhibit. Perhaps this is what you'll remember instead of the agonies of flying home.

Love the art, in the museum and Pulsifer's. I like the poplar-poplar-poplar series, but then it reminds me of the scenery driving along the San Berdoo freeway heading east. The poplars tick by at a regular rate, just within your peripheral vision.

Love museum cafes, too. I met a man at the British Museum cafe who was a visiting scholar there and living in a small apartment atop the museum built for just such purpose. You have to be invited by the museum. Wouldn't that be fun?